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By using Model Driven Development component tests could be skipped and integration and system testing went a lot smoother, said Bryan Bakker in the presentation Model Driven Development (MDD) and its impact on testing. Main results from the MDD approach are a reduction of the amount of testing and increased reliability of the code that was generated from a mathematical model.

The 2014 CAST Research on Application Software Health (CRASH) report states that enterprise software built using a mixture of agile and waterfall methods will result in more robust and secure applications than those built using either agile or waterfall methods alone. InfoQ interviewed Bill Curtis about structural quality factors, and mixing agile and waterfall methods.

The second version of the Reactive Manifesto was announced at September's GOTO conference in Aarhus. Martin Thompson discusses the need for a revised version of the Manifesto and what its changes mean for the burgeoning reactive community.

To enable development of secure products, processes covering the software development life cycle have to include security activities. Winfried Russwurm from Siemens and Peter Panholzer from Limes Security facilitated a workshop at the SEPG Europe 2013 conference where they explored security activities and presented the Application Guide for Improving Processes for Secure Products.

The first day of DevOps Days Amsterdam had its focus split between continuous delivery and promoting a DevOps culture. Talks focused on how to automate the deployment pipeline but also system recovery in case of failure. On the culture side leveraging distinct personality types to successfully introduce changes and the positive impact of strong company culture on hiring were some of the takeaways.

Who ever has wondered what kind of software is used by Santa Claus & Co, got a hint recently in youtube. This might irritate some software engineers who have assumed, Santa Claus would only use Open Source Software.

As announced on 18th August 2011, the Irish Software Engineering Research Center (Lero) has signed a €300.000 contract for a research project with the European Space Agency (ESA). Goal of the research activities is to provide a solution framework for future space missions.

Debugging event driven applications has always been notoriously difficult. The research project Footsteps project seeks to address the problems of reproducibility by offering a logging and replay framework that records non-deterministic events such as mouse clicks and random number generation. No plugins or special browsers are needed, this done entirely with JavaScript.

MongoDB's new journaling feature improves reliability with write-ahead redo logs. Log entries are written before permanent storage is updated. When a server restarts after a crash outstanding journal files will be replayed before the server goes online. Other changes include sharding performance boosts, shell tab completion, and the addition of covering and sparse indexes.

Google offers now two options for storage on its App Engine, the Master/Slave Datastore and the new High Replication Datastore, which remains available during downtime and offers a higher degree of resiliency to catastrophic failures.